Art and culture are nonetheless vital, essential even, to what it means to be human, yet digital abundance has diminished our sense of their worth.

Again, it does seem like frustration is mounting in interesting ways, but I'm not sure there will be some dramatic tipping point. Then again, looking back on the history of television, you never know. People had to fight and articulate the politics and the rationale for different funding mechanisms. That was a long and drawn-out battle fought in different countries; it's not like BBC and the CBC in Canada just magically appeared out of the ether. People had to organize for it. I'm always willing to be surprised.

It wasn't that people wanted things for free and asked for advertising to fund it - it's that these companies wanted to amass an audience whose "eyeballs" they could sell, and they gave people things for free to do that. Free services and content has been foisted upon us because there wasn't the will power to explore other options.

As an individual navigating this reality, you have to make choices to survive. Sometimes you happily work for free if it's something you love and believe in. I'm not categorically saying that working for free is bad. I'm just looking at the broader implications of it, and also challenge this idea - and again, this is an argument made by certain people in the tech world - that amateurs are automatically more pure and will triumph over stodgy professionals.

It's not just that we all as individuals should reevaluate our relationship with our devices - maybe you should, on a personal level - but in terms of balancing the micro and the macro and the personal and the structural, it's actually a bigger issue than you and your phone addiction.

I would like people to be more aware of the fact that ultimately we are paying for things, and it's not just as privacy advocates point out that we're paying with our time and our data. We're also paying with money, because the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on advertising is just factored into the cost of the goods that we buy. It's all coming out of our pocket, just in a really roundabout way.

We've been criticizing these superficial aspects, like whether we are all more distracted. We really need to articulate a defense, a critique, that merges awareness of the technology with a more traditional, progressive, left-wing critique of the market.